The problem for me is when folks have similar experiences but they ascribe very different meanings to the experience. This seems to happen a lot around IP stuff. There seems to be three responses about the same experience. Science wants to understand and explain so the experience can be used. Religion wants to make it all special and magic so the experiencer can feel good. And the other, I dont have a name for, just isn't curious about the experience at all.

I am a scientist, at least as far as the IP experience goes. I am personally rather anti-religious in general because it tends to favor exclusivity and deny inconvenient reality. And the third, nameless, frame of reference really confuses and scares me. At least the other two keep the conversation going.

I also see a troubling undercurrent of possible profit motive in the "It Has to be Felt" assertion. I think Graham C was touching on this a while back. I think some of the IHTBF is about using IP as a limited commodity, some of it is a religious clinging to exclusive specialness, and some of it is a bald lack of ability in some of the practitioners to put the experience into useful terms.

Yes, of course direct experience is important. That's why we sent folks to the moon. It shows that it CAN be done. Sometimes we dont get much more hard data than that, though. The experience isn't worth much to me unless I can get repeatable, verifiable data. If something "different" happens to me, I'm not going to suddenly adopt the religious point of view. "I can't explain it" is not equal to "It cannot be explained". I will find the person who can explain it, or I will develop my explanatory skills. But I will always remain interested.